Jerry Kramer Quotes

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.

I'm an enormous fan of American literature, and especially the great novels of Larry McMurtry, 'Lonesome Dove,' Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

I'm not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, 'Garden State' (1992) and 'The Ice Storm' (1994).

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish.

That complete statement which is literature.

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

I have no doubt that 'On the Road' is a Great American Novel. But I'm also certain my students will do fine without it.

I used to read Gore Vidal books and think I was cool.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

English culture is highly literary-based.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.